| Listening is one of the important ways for students to learn input language materials when they learn English.Learning the listening strategies is of great importance in our way to make breakthrough for listening.Among them,the listening cognitive strategy is an effective strategy for identifying,understanding,maintaining and extracting listening information.Therefore,it is valuable to explore topic concerning the use of cognitive strategies in learners' listening comprehension.This study intends to take six junior students in high school of Fujian Province as the objects to investigate their use of cognitive strategies in listening comprehension.Think-aloud protocol is employed to explore the following questions:(1)What are the listening cognitive strategies used in the listening comprehension among 6 junior high school students?(2)What are the differences in using listening cognitive strategies,when students are required to finish different listening tasks concerning image matching questions,dialogue comprehension questions,chart phrasing questions?(3)What are the differences in listening cognitive strategies used by 6 junior students with different listening proficiency?According to the text that was recorded and transcripted,it's found,with regard to the first question,that the participants use the four main listening cognitive strategies,including selective attention strategy,predicting strategy,note-taking strategy,and activating background knowledge strategy.It's shown that the selective attention strategy is used most frequently.Because the participants tend to focus on the key information which can help complete the listening task and ignore the irrelevant information,using this strategy can reduce the memory burden.Secondly,the predictive strategy is mainly used before listening because participants are mentally prepared.In addition,the background knowledge activated strategy is less frequently used than the predictive strategy,which was closely related to the participants' English knowledge reserve and proficiency.It is also shown that the advanced learners can have a better understanding of listening than the others.Finally,the note-taking strategy is least frequently used,which is closely related to the absence of note-taking awareness.Regarding to the second question,cognitive strategy used by the subjects is different in various listening comprehension tasks,such as picture matching,dialogue comprehension,and chart cloze.The cognitive strategy in dialogue comprehension task is most frequently used,followed by picture matching,and the chart cloze in which the cognitive strategy is the least used.As to the third research question,the result indicates there are obvious differences in the use of cognitive strategies among the subjects with different English proficiency,and there is a certain relationship between students' English proficiency and their use frequency of listening strategies.There is not much difference between the subjects with low-proficiency and the ones with high-proficiency in the use of selective attention strategy and note-taking strategy,but there is a substantial difference in use frequency of the predictive strategy and the background-related strategy.Besides,it is found that participants who are good at using cognitive strategies tend to get higher score.Therefore,it is important for learners to use cognitive strategies properly when they are listening to English.Finally,suggestions for listening teaching are put forwards according to the research findings.This study,based on the think-loud protocol,attempts to explore the hidden thinking process in listening comprehension and that in different listening comprehension tasks and that of students with different English proficiency.This study serves,in certain degree,as a modest spur to induce teachers to do further research on cognitive strategies used by junior high school students while they practice English listening. |
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